Yes, you read it right. This is a key lesson that I have assimilated in the past few weeks. Thanks to the popular blogger, Venkatesh Rao, for planting this idea in my head. He calls this as premium mediocre. I really found the article to be a typical of him: interesting but not easily accessible. Luckily he had done an AMA for the subscribers of his newsletter. All the answers in his two-part AMA were fantastic.
The following advice really stood out for me:
(What specific advice would you have for someone who is pretty thoroughly traumatized but not sure if she's learned enough from it?)
I think the best thing to do if you really are in this stage, is to lower your standards, embrace enlightened mediocrity, and focus on living well rather than "learning." Don't close your mind to learning, and accept the challenges and new experiences that life will continue to throw at you, but "learning" and "preparing" for life is no longer task #1. Task #1 is actually just surviving with grace and living life. Stop trying to win, work on continuing the game. Sometimes that's one day at a time, sometimes it's one year at a time. The life-long learning, hustling, stress-driving pressure we get from society is somewhat necessary (at a cost) in Act 1, but if you let it keep riding you into Act 2, it's mostly masochism. There's a point past which it makes more sense (and better mental health) to inhabit the life you've built for yourself as gracefully as you can, rather than trying to keep raging and storming to extract more from the universe.
I found this piece of advice very timely and very liberating for me. At the cost of winning and being successful, we beat ourselves too much and sometimes suffer a lot. It may manifest in some people as depression or irritation or simply being uncontent with everything. If you are deriving meaning for your life based on success and high standards, then it is easy to set oneself for disappointment.
As Nassim Taleb says in his book, the first and most important thing for thriving is as actually surviving. First survive and then think of thrive. So many times, I find this advice to let me put myself off the guard, enjoy the life, spend playing some goofy games with kids, watching trash-movies and junk-TV with family. Yes, they are not high quality entertainment, but living life with grace and happiness is much more important.